Islands of Space - John W. Campbell (pdf to ebook reader TXT) 📗

of the dull red plain below them and going over the ship, were several dim streaks of light across the sky. One of them was brighter than the rest, a bright white streak. The streaks didn’t move; they seemed to have been painted on the sky overhead, glowing bands of unwavering light.

“Those,” said Arcot, “are the nebulae. That wide streak is the one we just left. The bright streak must be a nearby star.

“They look like streaks because we’re moving so fast in so small an orbit.” He pointed to the red star beneath them. “We’re less than twenty miles from the center of that thing! We’re almost exactly thirty kilometers from its center, or about ten kilometers from its surface! But, because of it’s great mass, our orbital velocity is something terrific!

“We’re going around that thing better than three hundred times every second; our ‘year’ is three milliseconds long! Our orbital velocity is seven hundred thousand kilometers per second!

“We’re moving along at about a fifth of the speed of light!”

“Are we safe in this orbit?” Fuller asked.

“Safe enough,” said Arcot bitterly. “So damned safe that I don’t see how we’ll ever break free. We can’t pull away with all the power on this ship. We’re trapped!

“Well, I’m worn out from working under all that gravity; let’s eat and get some sleep.”

“I don’t feel like sleeping,” said Fuller. “You may call this safe, but it would only take an instant to fall down to the surface of that thing there.” He looked down at their inert, but titanically powerful enemy whose baleful glow seemed even now to be burning their funeral pyre.

“Well,” said Arcot, “falling into it and flying off into space are two things you don’t have to worry about. If we started toward it, we’d be falling, and our velocity would increase; as a result, we’d bounce right back out again. The magnitude of the force required to make us fall into that sun is appalling! The gravitational pull on us now amounts to about five billion tons, which is equalized by the centrifugal force of our orbital velocity. Any tendency to change it would be like trying to bend a spring with that much resistance.

“We’d require a tremendous force to make us either fall into that star⁠—or get away from it.

“To escape, we have to lift this ship out against gravity. That means we’d have to lift about five million tons of mass. As we get farther out, our weight will decrease as the gravitational attraction drops off, but we would need such vast amounts of energy that they are beyond human conception.

“We have burned up two tons of matter recharging the coils, and are now using another two tons to recharge them again. We need at least four tons to spare, and we only started out with twenty. We simply haven’t got fuel enough to break loose from this star’s gravitational hold, vast as the energy of matter is. Let’s eat, and then we can sleep on the problem.”

Wade cooked a meal for them, and they ate in silence, trying to think of some way out of their dilemma. Then they tried to sleep on the problem, as Arcot had suggested, but it was difficult to relax. They were physically tired; they had gone through such great strains, even in the short time that they had been maneuvering, that they were very tired.

Under a pull five times greater than normal gravity, they had tired in one-fifth the time they would have at one gravity, but their brains were still wide awake, trying to think of some way⁠—any way⁠—to get away from the dark sun.

But at last sleep came.

XI

Morey thought he was the first to waken when, seven hours later, he dressed and dove lightly, noiselessly, out into the library. Suddenly, he noticed that the telectroscope was in operation⁠—he heard the low hum of its smoothly working director motors.

He turned and headed back toward the observatory. Arcot was busy with the telectroscope.

“What’s up, Arcot?” he demanded.

Arcot looked up at him and dusted off his hands. “I’ve just been gimmicking up the telectroscope. We’re going around this dead dwarf once every three milliseconds, which makes it awfully hard to see the stars around us. So I put in a cutoff which will shut the telectroscope off most of the time; it only looks at the sky once every three milliseconds. As a result, we can get a picture of what’s going on around us very easily. It won’t be a steady picture, but since we’re getting a still picture three hundred times a second, it will be better than any moving picture film ever projected as far as accuracy is concerned.

“I did it because I want to take a look at that bright streak in the sky. I think it’ll be the means to our salvation⁠—if there is any.”

Morey nodded. “I see what you mean; if that’s another white dwarf⁠—which it most likely is⁠—we can use it to escape. I think I see what you’re driving at.”

“If it doesn’t work,” Arcot said coolly, “we can profit by the example of the people we left back there. Suicide is preferable to dying of cold.”

Morey nodded. “The question is: How helpless are we?”

“Depends entirely on that star; let’s see if we can get a focus on it.”

At the orbital velocity of the ship, focusing on the star was indeed a difficult thing to do. It took them well over an hour to get the image centered in the screen without its drifting off toward one edge; it took even longer to get the focus close enough to a sphere to give them a definite reading on the instruments. The image had started out as a streak, but by taking smaller and smaller sections of the streak at the proper times, they managed to get a good, solid image. But to get it bright enough was another problem; they were only picking up a fraction